2026-08-11T11:17:06Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:25597 2026-06-23T12:09:59Z ddc:004 open_access

No Signal to Rule Them All: A Systematic Analysis of In-Network Congestion Signals McClure, Sarah Dukkipati, Nandita Ratnasamy, Sylvia Shenker, Scott Congestion control in-network telemetry In this paper, we address the following question: what in-network signals should a network provide to congestion control algorithms? To answer this guiding question, we use prior work to automatically generate congestion control algorithms optimized for a given performance objective and set of in-network congestion signals. We then make observations about the relative value of these congestion signals across a range of performance objectives. Our analysis yields a surprising central finding: for the average case, sophisticated In-Network Telemetry (INT) offers minimal performance benefits over traditional end-to-end (E2E) signals, with performance typically within 3%. We also find no single "best" INT signal, but rather a clear trade-off that manifests in many scenarios: link-based signals often excel at controlling delay, while queue-based signals are better for maximizing throughput. To make these findings concrete, we validate them by examining the extent to which in-network signals improve the performance of the BBR congestion control algorithm. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Sarah McClure and Nandita Dukkipati and Sylvia Ratnasamy and Scott Shenker 2026 Is Part Of OASIcs, Volume 139, 1st New Ideas in Networked Systems (NINeS 2026) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/OASIcs.NINeS.2026.12 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-255974 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.NINeS.2026.12 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode